Once you’ve figured out the art of sewing beautiful clothes, accessories, furnishings or other pieces from ready-to-go patterns, you’ll want to learn how to make patterns yourself. It’s no fun being limited to someone else’s imagination, when you’ve got a perfectly capable and raring-to-go imagination of your own.

 

So what is the best pattern making book? If you’re a beginner, the answer to that question will probably be Pattern Making by Dennic Chunman. Here’s a book that will introduce you to all the first-things-to-know of pattern making, get you started on the road to crafting your own patterns, and then go on and give you your first taste of advance pattern making and fashion design techniques.

With instructions, inspiration, and lots and lots of important knowledge, this book will take you from the most complete novice and know-nothing to a sewer who is confident taking a stab at his or her own patterns. These 240 pages are 240 very full pages, and there are CAD/CAM diagrams as well as photographs of both dissected and finished projects.

One negative point: since this book was written with metric dimensions and then converted to inches, the numbers given for various measurements may seem a bit strange. Try thinking in centimeters and everything will become smooth and straightforward again.

 

Another wonderful book that will give you a solid introduction to pattern making is Donald McCunn’s How to Make Sewing Patterns. This is an old book (originally published in 1977) but the content is such that it has stayed in-date while many other books have made their flashy debuts and then been bowed out by non-impressed readers.

Since the time it was first published this book has never gone out of print. Though the illustrations—simple line drawings– may lack the modern spark, they’ve got a solid clarity to them that keeps this book an important go-to resource for many would-be sewers. This book begins by teaching you how to make basic patterns from a real-life model, and goes on to explain how to incorporate various design elements—your own inventions or something you’ve seen and want to copy– in your creative patterns. It also includes sections on how to alter existing patterns to fit ‘non-ideal’ models perfectly.

 

What about if you’re already making your own patterns, but just want some inspiration and a bit of extra know-how to bring your creations from the sphere of ordinary and everyday to out of this world? Then maybe Pattern Magic by Tomoko Nakamichi is the best pattern making book for you.

This is not a book of basic instruction in making your own simple patterns for you or your children; instead, it’s a professional extravaganza exploring non-standard designs and creative, extremely ambitious patterning based on nature, geometry, or street scenes. Sound intriguing? After all, there’s no reason to restrict your designs to sensible straightforward Jane and Bill pieces when there’s so many more possibilities waiting for you. This book is very well illustrated, with both clear diagrams and sketches and beautiful photography.

Three very different books: three approaches to the world of pattern making. Which one means ‘best’ to you?